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By
The Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead by Aaron
Zimmerman
Changing and Improving Your Life Through CUTLAS
by Eliot Greebee
ISBN
1-881471-22-5 $13.00 US | $17.95
CAN 256 pages
The Author has a website dedicated to his main character at
greebee.com
Find the book on
Amazon>
French philosophy forms a conceptual
undercurrent for the book: the sophistic arguments of this
super-sized Sartre harken back to the perverse enlightenment
logic of
Sade, and Zimmerman's prose
sparkles when he engages Batialleian religious imagery
(e.g., the
"porcine holocaust," or Eliot
Greebee's meditations on death while floating drugged and
naked upon
the Atlantic). Zimmerman
draws a charmingly puerile Eliot, unable to wait for a
moment,
philosophically unable to delay
gratification, physically unable to resist consuming any
potable on his
person, whether candy,
drugs, or alcohol. Eliot is completely determined by
consumer culture
and dreams in "richer
colors, deep green the color of Astroturf, purple like grape
Bubble-Yum, orange like Orange
Crush, red like Hawaiian Punch." Review of
Contemporary
Fiction
Brooklyn is the
home of debut novelist Aaron Zimmerman, while
the East Village is home to his fictional protagonist,
the overweight author
Eliot Greebee, in By the Time You
Finish This Book You Might Be Dead. Chapters from
the fictional
writer's fictional
nonfiction guide, Changing and
Improving Your Life Through CUTLAS,
alternate with the narrative of
Greebee's antic pursuit of a maiden fair in
this send-up of the self-help industry. (CUTLAS stands for Cost/benefit
United-based
Transactional Life Analysis System, Greebee's proposed panacea for
life's woes.) "There's a wonderful overlap," says publisher
Tod
Thilleman. "It's a madcap adventure of 24 hours in New York, but the
general thrust is actually very dark. This manic guy is
obviously in his own
world. The action ends up in Coney Island." Publishers Weekly, October 2003
Self-Improvement
meets self-loathing, sex treads closer to dissolution than resolution,
and places like
Las Vegas and Coney Island manifest the dark night of the
American psyche. Aaron Zimmerman has
turned the longings of a bloated, horny, statistical
pontificator into one fantastic novel. Lauren
Sanders, author of Kamikaze Lust
Funny and Deeply poignant, Zimmerman
has
masterfully combined a must read self-improvement manifesto
with a sexy, cocaine and alcohol
fueled epic. A neon
illuminated lost weekend among the damaged, vapid and
disparaging.
Donald Breckenridge,
author of 6/2/95
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